EPISODE 29: DR. CATHY J. COHEN

Mary Morten: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to “Gathering Ground.” I'm Mary Morton, your host and president of Morten Group, LLC, a Chicago-based national consulting firm. We are celebrating 20 years of transformation through assessment, education, and action. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the podcast, which enters its fourth year this month. Thank you for continuing to listen as we profile and chat with those who are working tirelessly across many sectors on growth in the areas of racial equity, access, diversity, and inclusion. 

This month on “Gathering Ground,” I am excited to welcome a dear friend of mine and, dare I say it, powerhouse of activism, advocacy, and academia. 

I don't use that word a lot, Cathy, as you can imagine. 

I'm happy to welcome Dr. Cathy J. Cohen. Cathy's career began as a tenured professor at Yale University, where she began to create the groundwork for the revolutionary research and activism she would eventually engage in. In 1999, she released her first book, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics, which explores how issues such as age, gender, sexuality, and the AIDS epidemic shape the acceptance boundaries in the Black community. And we're going to definitely talk about AIDS and HIV a little later in our conversation. Her work has earned her national and I would say international recognition and attention. And I'm sure, as she tells us all about herself, you'll understand why. I am really thrilled to welcome Dr. Cathy J. Cohen to “Gathering Ground.”

Hi, Cathy.

Cathy J. Cohen: Hi, Mary. Thanks so much for the invitation to be in conversation with you. This is very exciting, and congratulations on four years of the podcast and 20 years of doing incredible work. I dare say you are the powerhouse.

Mary Morten: So you know to stop all that. (Laughs.)

Cathy J. Cohen: (Laughs.) All right, enough of that, enough of that.

Mary Morten: Now that we've gotten that out of the way –

Cathy J. Cohen: Exactly.

Mary Morten: – one of the things that we like to do as we start a conversation is to set some context for our listeners about the background of our guest, and I want to start by asking you, what led you to your work in the academy, as we say, or as you all say. (Laughs.)

Cathy J. Cohen: (Laughs.) 

Mary Morten: Tell us a little bit about how things got started in Toledo. 

Cathy J. Cohen: As you note, I am from Toledo, Ohio, and when people ask me this question about kind of how did you get into the academy, I always start with my family, my parents in particular. I grew up in a working-class Black family, and like many working-class Black families, my parents emphasized, first and foremost, education, education, education. Right? It was a way towards mobility, it was an opportunity to provide service to your community – right? – and it was always, you know, the language, something that folks or white supremacy couldn't take away from you. So, you know, education was emphasized, service of course was emphasized, but also in my house it was politics. My father was a union man, he would say. My mother worked in the church on not just service projects but political projects, and so I watched them work to transform things around them. And then, of course, as a young – back then, yes – young, Black, working-class, feminist lesbian, you know, when I read, I was learning about systems of oppression in my own life. I was experiencing systems of oppression and maybe the broader construct of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, but I was always surrounded by people who were thinking about how do we resist, how do we insert our voices, how do we build new organizations that will make demands? And so, in many ways, I feel like my life in Toledo, the surrounding of my family, the lessons that were taught, as well as just my positioning in the world primed me for doing the work that I try to do focused on ensuring that folks who are most marginal have voice, that we build collective power, and that we struggle for liberation and freedom and joy. I always like to lead us towards joy. So that led me to thinking about those spaces where I could insert my own voice, focus on research, because I loved research. I grew up and went to a public school where there were teachers who, you know, embraced and pushed me to be an intellectual. Even though I didn't have the language for that, they were like, you do well, so let's help you do even better. And eventually, I ended up deciding I wanted to be in the academy – and I'm going on and on, but I'll be quick on this remember as an undergrad I had a course on politics and this white woman walks in and she was powerful and strong and determined, and I thought, I want to do what she does. And I thought, I don't know what – how you become a professor – (laughs) – but I'm going to figure out how you become a professor, because I think I want to do that. And that – all of that led me into the academy.

Mary Morten: Really? That is a story I've never heard before, in terms of how you started in the academy. That is fascinating. Also, I don't think I realized that we have some similar backgrounds in terms of our mothers really being activists because all my activism came from watching my mother in our community. She was a precinct captain and was always going to meetings, which is why I think I can sit through meetings to this day. (Laughs.)

Cathy J. Cohen: Yes. I'm going to give that realm more to my father than my mother, but my mother I think also taught the lesson of building community to me. She had – you know, in her family there were seven of them. I had like 25 cousins just on her side and another 20 on my dad's side. And so there were always these big family gatherings, but there were also people who weren't kind of blood-related but were related, you know, and I think what was critical to her is that you always think about who your community is. You feed your people; you support your people; you stay in touch with your people. My father was the more formal politician, political person. My mother was the community builder but also an institution builder, in particular in the church. And the combination of the two kind of set me on a path that said, you have to be responsive, accountable, active, and be engaged in social transformation.

Mary Morten: All right. I love it. 

Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the work you're doing right now at the University of Chicago that is really exciting you about the future, if you will.

Cathy J. Cohen: Well, I would point, of course, to GenForward. It's the first of its kind, nationally representative survey of young adults, 18 to 36, that is in the field bimonthly. But what's different about our survey is that its emphasis is on young adults of color. We have over 3,000 respondents, which allows us to disaggregate by race. I often say it's topical; it's not a one-off, so you're trying to make sure you do your survey and produce data that won't go old. We're willing to let data go old because we want to be current, in fact. And we want to think about kind of questions that matter to young folks of color.

We're also asking more questions about how they perceive racism. Are they invested in democracy and socialism? What do they think of protest? What do they think of kind of defund the police or abolition? So we're trying to create a space where young folks of color can talk about the issues that matter to them, and then we can use that data to insert their voices into a kind of public discourse. So we continue to work on GenForward. We can talk later about the reimagining of the Black Youth Project, which we're trying to do. And then – I know it's something dear to your heart.

Another thing that's really exciting, which is not an academic project, but there has been a group of faculty who have been working under the label More than Diversity at the University of Chicago. We came together in the fall of 2020 after folks – and we’re still in the streets, but folks had gone into the street to say, wait a minute, we have to reimagine our relationship to this university. We have basically four demands – after a very long letter, people said, that letter’s too long – (laughs) – it’s like five pages, giving context and everything. But we said, we want a new department which looks like it's going to come to fruition, entitled Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity. At the University of Chicago there has never been a Department of African-American Studies or any sort so that – 

Mary Morten: That is huge.

Cathy J. Cohen: It is huge. We asked for a truth commission to be comprised of half university folks and half community folks to look at the university's relationship and history to the South Side of Chicago and the city of Chicago that was announced last month. Eve Ewing and I are working with a group of fantastic graduate students and undergrads on a project we're calling Reimagining Public Safety. The University of Chicago has the third-largest police force in the state of Illinois. 

Mary Morten: Really?

Cathy J. Cohen: Yes. (Laughs.) Yes. The little-known secrets of the University of Chicago. And we want to take serious people's need to be safe, people's need to be safe, for their kids to be safe. But are there examples? Are there possibilities for reimagining what public safety looks like? Not just absent the police but thinking differently about the police.

Mary Morten: Fascinating. I had no idea that that was happening. I love that the title is More Than Diversity. Is that what –

Cathy J. Cohen: That is. And let me just tell you the fourth one, because it’s relevant, which is reimagining the work and the structure of how the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion happens at the university.

Mary Morten: Well, you know, that's our work. That’s part of our work.

Cathy Cohen:  I know.

Mary Morten: And I appreciate that you have clearly called out equity and inclusion. Sometimes people want to refer to it as D&I, and I'm like, where’s equity? Because that's the (bottom line ?).  

Cathy Cohen:  Exactly.

Mary Morten: Right? We’ve got to move beyond equality, because guess what, y'all. We don't all start in the same place. And diversity is really the basement in many ways. It's a picture of difference. We must have that, and then we must move on. So I really want to find out more about that because that is closely aligned to what we are working on all the time at Morten Group, and just as you’ve said, there was an increased interest in these topics. I mean, first we saw it in 2016 in a real way after that election, and then after the death of George Floyd. So I'm always saying we’ve got to keep moving because we never know when this will not be –

Cathy J. Cohen: That’s right.

Mary Morten: – will not have center attention, and so we’ve got to get a lot of things done as quickly as we can, while we have this mainstream attention, really –

Cathy J. Cohen: That’s right.

Mary Morten: – around this topic. Yeah.

Cathy J. Cohen: I think that's right. And we also – so two things: one, people can go to the More Than Diversity website to see all this delineated and discussed. But the other thing I was going to say is also that people are mobilizing in nontraditional places so that we can pull together a group of faculty, largely faculty of color, to say, we're going to change our relationship to this university and we've got to make some demands on this university. I take as a kind of outcome of young people and all sorts of people going into the street, and so you're absolutely right about using this moment, yeah, using that energy.

Mary Morten: Absolutely. So that as people are saying, it's just not a moment.

Cathy J. Cohen: That's right. 

Mary Morten: (Inaudible) – move toward a movement. 

And one of the things about being in the pandemic is that it's provided an opportunity for people to be involved in many different ways. While we would like not to have to do everything virtually, the reality is, in some cases, people have had more accessibility. 

Cathy J. Cohen: I agree. 

Mary Morten: What have you learned about yourself (after being ?) sheltered in place in March of 2020? 

Cathy J. Cohen: Oh, my. What have I learned about myself? Here’s what I’ve learned: I don't mind working from home. Right? (Laughs.) I don't mind working in sweat pants every day. (Laughter.) And I say that kind of, oh, that's funny, but there has been less stress in my life in many ways. There is a way it feels like I can regulate the work a bit more. I know Zoom is hard for lots of people. I don't love Zoom, especially [if] you're trying to teach a seminar on Zoom; it's not ideal. I like being in the classroom with students. But there is something nice about having our family here all together.

Beth Richie, my partner, is often on one floor; Ella, our daughter, used to be on a different floor. I would be in the basement – (laughs) – where I am now. Then we'd meet up for lunch. Then we'd go back and do more work and we’d meet up for dinner. There was a kind of lovely closeness, and I said it's almost selfish because Ella's soon to be 16, as you know. 

Mary Morten: I can’t believe it.

Cathy J. Cohen: I know. I know. It's hard –

Mary Morten: It’s stunning to me.

Cathy J. Cohen:  Let’s just deny it. But this is a moment when she started – actually started thinking about driving, her friends are starting to drive, she started to think about college, and so all of those things will take her away. And in a very selfish way, the pandemic said, you’ve got to wait a year before you get to go away. So that has been lovely. The other thing is, for Beth and I, you love somebody, but then you think, can I be in the house with them all day – (laughs) – for a year? And then you find out you can. And so it's nice to know that you can exist in the same space, share stories, enjoy each other's company, and also find those spaces where you can be alone. 

So, you know, there are lots of ways that it has been positive. The other way – what did we learn about it? – that, you know, it's painful. I've lost family members. The disproportionate impact on Black communities has been painful to watch and to take in. You know, you have watched the kind of deep polarization in this country where, you know, things that just don't make sense – like, you won't get a vaccine. And the thing is, some of that is in my extended family. I’ve got nieces and nephews, and so you're kind of also like, I love these people, I thought I knew these people; are you kidding me that you won’t – so, you know, it every day brought something new to learn from. But I think in a really interesting way that I probably didn't expect, it was a little less stressful. It made me slow down. I was on far fewer airplanes and having many more family dinners. And for that I am grateful. Yeah.

Mary Morten: Wonderful. No, it sounds very familiar. This idea that of course in Black and brown communities the COVID-19 has been exacerbated and people being surprised by that. I've been personally happy that it's been in the news cycle more than just the initial 72 hours and that we know, you know, if you have any sort of understanding of public health that the social determinants of health and how you live, how you work, how you play are things that many of us have understood and now we're talking about it in much more of a routine manner, like it's being lifted up on a regular basis, and for that I'm certainly grateful. It's made us understand equity in a very different way, when we think about Chicago Public Schools and young people having to sit in parking lots to get online. And, you know, it also, of course, points out how much work we still have to do and why some of your work has been particularly important. So there are many things I agree that have – that I think I am grateful for. I work virtually most of the time, so it was not a huge pivot; however, not seeing people, not going places, that was very different. And we're getting used to coming out with a lot of mitigations at this point and ways that we can try to exist with this COVID-19.  

OK, let's talk a little bit about your work in greater detail. So let's talk about the freedom fellow.  Tell us about that, and I'm interested, when you think about research in a project, are you working with a team of folks? Do you have some sense of what you want to do and you take it to other folks and they say, yeah, we think that's great and we'll, you know, form this research team? So talk to us a little bit about that process.

Cathy J. Cohen: Sure. So I think you mean freedom scholars, right? 

Mary Morten: Did I say freedom –

Cathy J. Cohen: It's all right. I'm happy to be a freedom fellow or a freedom scholar. (Laughter.) It's this wonderful prize, award, but it's also a little baffling to me – (laughs) – you know, I hope they don't take my money away – but I mean in the sense that they are committed – meaning Marguerite Casey Foundation –  they're committed to building a cohort and I think they want a large cohort of scholars whose research they believe will, for example, provide – I think they say critical insight to social justice leaders and whose ideas will encourage us – I'm quoting them – for all of us to imagine how we can radically improve our democracy, economy, and society. That’s absolutely fantastic. But, you know, I didn't have to apply for it. It's not like they said, here is the idea, tell us what you will do with this money, this cash award. Instead, one day I turned on my computer, went to my email, was checking my email like I do every day, and there was an email that said, hi, you have been named – (laughs) – a freedom scholar and it comes with money to give you some freedom. So it is humbling – right? – because it is meant to be a comment hopefully on the kind of body of work that you've put together in the academy. It is exciting in terms of the people who are also freedom scholars, really exceptional scholars that I have admired and call friends, and it kind of opens up the possibility to me about what we really could do. I think it's great that they're giving awards to individuals, but I also want us to think about what's the infrastructure, the organizations that we can build that really do change the academy? I think individual scholars do what they can. They provide great courses. They are on committees. Hopefully they have relationships with folks in their communities. They've had centers. I think to really have an infrastructure – like, and I can talk later about the Scholars for Social Justice, where you're trying to organize scholars or you're making demands on institutions and the academy universities, where you're planning campaigns, doing political education. To me, that's also the kind of future of freedom scholars. It's really building out something that can change the nature of the academy to emphasize what you were just talking about questions, for example, of equity and pushing back and challenging white supremacy that still defines universities and colleges.  

Mary Morten: All right. And I love how you've mentioned white supremacy a number of times and I was saying to one of my team members, I’ve said white supremacy more in the last two years –  

Cathy J. Cohen: Thank you. (Laughs.)

Mary Morten: – than I’ve said it in a very long time because we just have to call it as it is. (Laughs.) Right? 

Cathy J. Cohen: That's it. And generally, now, people don't say, well, what do you mean by that? Yeah, OK, white supremacy, you know?

Mary Morten: I know. There are some people that get very nervous and equate it with, well, you might as well have said I had on a hood, and I’m like, OK, that’s not what we’re saying. We have all been impacted by whites supremacy culture. OK? 

Cathy J. Cohen: Exactly.

Mary Morten: (Every single ?) one of us. We’re just trying to identify it so that we can do something about it.

Cathy J. Cohen: That’s what’s amazing about white supremacy. You don’t need a hood. You don't need individuals. 

Mary Morten: Thank you.

Cathy J. Cohen: You need the reproduction of privilege and power. 

Mary Morten: That's exactly right. Oh, my goodness, no.

So tell me about how you decide on your research projects.

Cathy J. Cohen: Yeah. I mean, it really does vary, but I will say I like to think of myself, in some ways, as a social researcher, and what I mean by social is thinking about teams. Increasingly within universities, there is the kind of language of labs where you have one or two principal investigators, usually faculty members; you have maybe – in my case, there are one or two postdocs that I work with – right? – so they're full-time employees of the project, and then a bunch of team members, some at the university, some not. So some former students that I think are doing really incredible work and I want to be in conversation – we'll bring them on the team. We try to identify graduate students in the department and undergraduates throughout the university, and they all become a part of the team. I think in all of my work, the best moments have been and the best insights have been produced because there are lots of different people in the room who hold different positionalities who think about the world differently, exist in the world differently and feel comfortable, at least some of the time – (laughs) – saying, you know what, Cathy, or Professor Cohen, or whatever they're calling me, how about we do this? It is kind of expanding the way I think about a project, making sure that they have some access and some power so that they can guide the project. And so I feel like that has largely been the way we've done research. I think what I try to do differently and what the team or the lab tries to do differently is to think about research not just as research. So what's the long-term project or contribution you want to make from this research project?

Mary Morten: So when you talk about your teams, you're looking at students you've worked with, you're looking at students who really made themselves known and it was clear they were interested in the work in a particular way. I know you have really mentored and coached students, met some of them over the years. How do you continue those relationships once the project is over? Or do you?

Cathy J. Cohen: I try to – right? – (laughs) – and, you know, it varies depending on the student. Usually our connection is not just the research. You know, I'm very clear, as a senior Black woman in the academy I have a responsibility to think about protect but also push young folks of color in particular who want to be in the academy. And so those relationships are about research, but it's also about, like, how do you survive and sharing ideas and stories about that, or, you know, helping them if they're trying to do a research project and need a little more money and I got money in my research fund, here's a little to get you the sample that you need so you can write the dissertation. And some of the relationships are just like – you know, I love some of these folks. They're just – they're kind, they're smart, they're funny, and you just connect at a deeper level. So if you take someone like – I shouldn't start naming names – (laughs) – but there are some people that I continue to work with now that I knew them when they were undergrads and now they're 35, 40, so I've known them a long time and we have a working relationship. There are former graduate students. I just heard from one the other day and they are on our research team and they are like, you'll never get rid of me. (Laughs.) And I was like, that's great, I don't want to get rid of you. So I think there are places where, in fact, you just connect with people. You believe in their work, they believe in you, they get to know your family, you know, they become a deeper part of your community, and so it just goes beyond the research. And that's not to say that the connections we have just around research aren't important, but there are these opportunities where the connection goes deeper.

Mary Morten: Well, It's definitely community building in a different way. And as you know, assets include your education and your network. Who do you know? 

We're going to come back in just a moment and talk about a project that is near and dear to my heart, the Black Youth Project. 

You're listening to my conversation with Dr. Cathy Cohen. We'll be back in just a moment. This is “Gathering Ground.”

Welcome back to “Gathering Ground.” We're continuing my conversation with Dr. Cathy J. Cohen, and I am excited to talk to you about a project that I connected with on a very deep level, the Black Youth Project. It was the catalyst for a film that I did, believe it or not, 10 years ago.

Cathy J. Cohen: That is incredible to me.

Mary Morten: Isn’t that unbelievable? And it was dedicated to your daughter, Ella.

Cathy J. Cohen: Who was little.

Mary Morten: Yes. Oh, my goodness. So let's start about the idea behind this research project.

Cathy J. Cohen: For me, the Black Youth Project started out of trying to reflect, in certain ways, the conversations, the complicated nature or the complicated thinking of my nieces and nephews that I didn't see reflected in the literature. I always say that – right? – that oftentimes books and articles that focused on young Black people kind of were written from a deficit model, trying to note the things that they did not do well – the bad decisions, the sex too early, the drinking – things that other kids did also but that became to define them. And, you know, in my home, over holidays talking with nieces and nephews, I saw a depth of understanding of oppression, of their opportunities, of even their failures. They were quite willing to also talk about the bad decisions they had made, but they also understood that they, you know, were in school systems that had less funding, that their job prospects were less full, and I thought, in fact, that they provided a very complicated sense of how they were positioned. And so the Black Youth Project was started as – someone called it a radical research project, where we were going to do a big survey, which we did, but root that survey in the lives of young Black people.  We were going to have a section on did you vote, but we were also going to ask about hip-hop and what hip-hop meant and the politics of hip-hop. And it took us a year to develop the survey. Every Monday at 8:30 I met with a group of young people, grad students, undergrads, others, and we worked on the survey, worked on the survey. We assumed that they had expertise over their own lived experience that they brought into the room and that had to be respected. 

What was beautiful about what happened to the Black Youth Project was that many of the young people in that room were like, OK, we we need to continue the conversation we started with young Black people through the survey and through the research. And I was like all in; yes, we do; how are we going to do that? And they were like, we need a website. You know, that was back in 2006, 2007. I’m like a website? (Laughs.) And the first iteration of the website was pretty horrible. It was what you would think an academic would produce; it was static, had a lot of text, and they kept saying, we can do better, we can do better, we can do better. It really became this kind of space where I often say young Black people could speak for themselves about the issues that mattered to them without censorship and that we were going to secure a space on this thing, the emerging internet, that would have to deal with young Black people, that – where they could control it and they could decide what content was included. And that has continued on and it has taken many different forms. For example, you know, we hosted the gathering of 100 young Black activists that led to BYP 100. We incubated BYP 100 for a couple of years. Now it's a completely independent entity, but we are very proud of that work. It's always about, as we talk about, voice, knowledge, and action. How do we support the voice, expand the knowledge, and not lead but facilitate the action of young Black people? So that's really what the Black Youth Project was. 

Now I want to hear about your film.

Mary Morten: Well, you know, I was in your kitchen – 

Cathy J. Cohen: Yes, I know. (Laughs.)

Mary Morten: – picked up the report, and I thought, wow, this is fascinating, this is really interesting, and understanding also because I'm a filmmaker and work in radio and television and all those things, in addition to having this consulting business, but thinking images are important and there will be a lot of folks who will not read this report, who will not really understand what's happening. But the report really was the first of its kind where we heard from young people in their own voice and I had been looking for a documentary idea, and I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to talk to some young Black folks? Oh, my goodness, you know, what an idea, and then we took about two years. First of all, we took about a year to find the youth and we looked here in Chicago, we looked in New Orleans, we looked in Bayview in California, and in the end, you know, we stayed in Chicago because, honestly, it was much easier to track five young people ages, you know, 16 through 20. Actually, some of them may have been 15 – no small feat. I had three producers. That was their job is to keep up with these young folks and for them to understand, really, when we're making a documentary, you don't have to do anything. We show up with a camera; you just live your life. I remember one young woman saying, I'm just really busy, I don't think I'm going to have time to be in the documentary. I said, OK, fine, but you really don't have to do anything. It really is our job to keep up with you. And what you – what happens is you build a rapport and, like many things, you move at the speed of trust, and so as people started to know each other and trust each other more, then we would get more access. And so we filmed these young folks for two years. We had a big premiere at the Gene Siskel Center here in Chicago.

Cathy J. Cohen: Yes.

Mary Morten: You know, and then we went off and toured. It was on, you know, PBS, all those different things. Like I remember I took one of the doc subjects, Morgan, with me to the White House for Black History Month reception and it was just really interesting to see all that through her eyes, you know, because I was very fortunate; I had been to the White House several times and to be able to see this experience and to experience this with her. We happened to get in the East Room; the president was speaking and I got her right up to the rope and he had already said, I'm not coming out – this is President Obama, of course – he said, I'm not coming out; there’s too many of you that I know, I can't come down and say hello, but he did. And I introduced him and I said, Mr. President, I'd love to introduce you to Morgan Price, and he said, hey, Morgan, how are you? I thought she was going to melt into that floor.

Cathy J. Cohen: (Laughs.)

Mary Morten: But it was one of those life-changing kinds of experiences, and on our way to the White House, that day at O'Hare someone said to her, you look familiar; have I seen you on television? And the documentary had just been on – I mean, you know, really unusual occurrences. And so it was a great experience. We traveled a lot. I mean, it was stunning, but at the same time, this is why this work was so important, is the number of times we would do a panel and someone would say, yes, we have so-and-so coming and doctor-this-person – I said, where are the young people?

Cathy J. Cohen: Exactly.

Mary Morten: You do understand that this film is about young people speaking in their own voice and what we did – because we told their stories separately and then we would really use some data points, you know, in the film to underscore some of the conversations we were having with them. I mean, adultism is alive and well, as we know, and I would sometimes have to really go to the mat with why, if we did not have a young person on the panel, then we weren't going to do a panel. 

Cathy J. Cohen: Right. This is – I don't mean to interrupt, but this is the same thing we’re trying to think through, which is the entire team are younger young adults and I think we are in a period of transition where I would like to say it's yours now. I'm happy to help you raise money, but you make the decisions. You know, we've created that to some degree with the Black Youth Project. We're trying to build that out with GenForward. But I think you always have to be thinking about, who is making decisions? Who has power? How do you ensure that I'm not the only voice, even though – and I think this is to your point – quite often funders are most comfortable with me because, oh, you're at the university of Chicago, so you have to say, well, yep, yep, but that's – and this has been a big issue with us because we're creating data that we want media to utilize and, you know, we'll have five other people that I'd like them to interview and sometimes you just have to say, I'm not going to do the interview. You know, if you're not going to interview them, then we're not going to have the interview. It's okay. Yeah.

Mary Morten: Exactly. And people would say to me, well, you know, these young people are just exceptional and that's why you're getting this kind of reception to the film. And I said, you know what? They are exceptional, but they're not exceptions. There are many stories like these stories; however, to your point, this is not what we see on the 10 o'clock news, and I understand because the 10 o'clock news is not the medium for it. The average time for a story in the 10 o'clock news is one minute and 30 seconds. So we're not going to hear about the backdrop, the background of a young person's life and why they may be in a particular situation.

And when people ask me, how did you come up with the title, we were in Bayview filming and this young person said, a male-identified person, said, I don't drink, I don't do drugs, but I still get stopped by the police like all my friends do; I guess I “woke up Black.” 

So the work, as you know, continues, and we did a study guide and we've toured with it. I'm happy to say that we are also working on the reunion –

Cathy J. Cohen: I love that. I love that.

Mary Morten: We filmed most of them in August of this past year.

Cathy J. Cohen: Wow. 

Mary Morten: And so they're literally holding Ph.D.s, running nonprofits, attorneys, working in educational systems. It's really been interesting to see how they've evolved, and just like your grad students and undergrad students and research team, I've developed a relationship with them in ways that I didn't expect and it's been wonderful for me. I've really gotten so much out of this, and you just don't know sometimes, when you start a project like this, what you're going to receive, but the gifts keep coming, I would say. And it was a really important project for me. And when you think about coming full circle now with BYP 100, a couple of years ago in New Orleans, we did a retreat for BYP 100.

Cathy J. Cohen: There you go.

Mary Morten: Yeah.

Cathy J. Cohen: Exactly.

Mary Morten: Really incredible. So that project – very important and I'm happy to hear that you're continuing to leverage it.

Cathy J. Cohen: Yeah. But I was going say two things about BYP about kind of full circle. One is, increasingly we're trying to make sure that, for example, GenForward is in conversation with BYP. Right? Because BYP is an important space for young people to speak back to all sorts of things, including data, and so we have a webinar series called Data for Liberation, where we bring on activists from around the country, often younger activists, but not always, and we, you know, talk about how they think about activism, what's their analysis, but we also talk about data points and we say, you know, if you're doing work around defund and our data suggests – which I think is true – that the majority of young people and young Black people don’t support defund at this moment, what does it mean for your campaign? How do you strategize around that? And so much of our work at GenForward is about, you know, supporting movements, producing data that will complicate our understanding of how young people think about the world and how they're living in the world.

And part of what we're trying to do now is just to increasingly work in partnership. So, for example, we are talking with the Movement for Black Lives, or we've done partnerships with Next100, which is a policy group of young people, young activists and advocates, or we are going to do a project hopefully on the other swing voter, which would be young Black people and young people of color.

We can produce data that other people need to do movement work to kind of reimagine the landscape. And I think that's the most effective work that we can do is when GenForward is allowing BYP to speak back, when GenForward is kind of working to advance the goals of movements and organizations that are about kind of empowering young people.

Mary Morten: So a few moments ago you said defund; you want to just –

Cathy J. Cohen: I’m sorry, defund the police. Right? So we could talk about that. To me, this is an example of the difference between polls that focus on young people that want to know if you're going to vote in the midterm, which is an important question, but also, how are they thinking about policing? So if we're really interested in that, then we – like we do, we have a series of questions that asks, have you been contacted by the police? Have you been harassed by the police? All sorts of things. We also ask questions about, do you think you have enough police in your neighborhood? Do you believe we should defund the police? Do you believe we should reduce the budgets of police? Do you think there should be a new unit focused on mental health and social services outside of the police? And I think the media does us all a disservice when they ask one question about defund and receive very little support and we say, oh, people don't want defund; look, nobody wants defund. Well, that's not true. What we're seeing is,first of all, an evolution in thinking that defund the police was put onto the agenda and it's changing the discourse.

Mary Morten: Absolutely.

Cathy J. Cohen: It's making people think about, well, what should policing look like? Do we need police? What might public safety look like? And if you're not asking all of those questions, then we don't understand the breadth of thinking that young people are engaging around when we talk about something like policing. And that's what GenForward is trying to do.

Mary Morten: How do you find your survey respondents?

Cathy J. Cohen: OK, so we work through NORC. They have a very large – 

Mary Morten: And that is?

Cathy J. Cohen: National Opinion Research Center, sorry. It's the gold standard, they would say, in surveys. They have a big panel, the AmeriSpeak Panel, and so they produce respondents and then the respondents or the responses are weighted so that it becomes nationally representative. Yeah. So it's good data. It's very good data.

Mary Morten: So how does NORC get folks to respond to data?

Cathy J. Cohen: So, one, they have a panel, meaning they have a group of people who've committed to answer questions on surveys. Then they have an outside panel where they go and they recruit people. So it used to be, you could do this by just calling folks and they would answer their phone. Now you have to figure out different ways of getting in touch with people. Sometimes if it's a nonprobability sample, people can opt in, so you can say, oh, you can fill out this survey online and people opt in. The thing is, we know that people who opt into those types of surveys don't look like the general population. So you have to have a balance of probability and nonprobability sampling so that in the end you can produce data where you feel comfortable saying this really does represent how young people across the country are thinking about an issue.

Mary Morten: And so if a young person is interested in getting involved in GenForward, what would they do?

Cathy J. Cohen: If they're interested in getting involved in GenForward – not answering the survey but in GenForward, they should contact Dr. Cathy Jean Cohen on email at cjcohen@uchicago.edu. But if you look up Cathy Cohen online, they can pretty much find my email.

Mary Morten: All right. Well, we will put that information on our website when we release this episode, because we do want people to connect, particularly as we get ready for clearly a new Supreme Court justice and also the midterm elections.

What do you – what are you thinking about for the midterm elections and the work of GenForward? 

Cathy J. Cohen: We'll ask some basic questions about, you know, are you going to vote, but we're going to ask questions about their feelings towards Biden, toward the vice president. What are the most important issues that they want pursued? What we have seen already in the data is the things that are most important to young folks of color – whether it's attacking racism or protecting voting rights, they're worried about COVID, they're worried about their neighborhoods – are not the issues that they believe President Biden is taking charge on. So I think you see a very unenthused and demobilized group of young folks of color in particular, and the Democrats could be in real trouble unless they figure out a way to excite this population, this group. And I'm sure he's thinking that the new Supreme Court justice will do some of that work. But they've got to figure out some other ways to speak to this.

Mary Morten: You know, when I was reading an article, I think it was announcing the Marguerite Casey freedom scholars, I believe you talked a little bit about reproductive justice and how that was an issue certainly that both of us, I know, worked on over the years and, in particular, because you have a young daughter, how important that was to her future.

Can you say a little bit about that and how all of this work – right – is going to impact the future?

Cathy J. Cohen: Right. I never thought I would be raising a daughter in 2022 that faced a future where her reproductive rights and her right to an abortion, if she so choose, would be denied in certain states. I mean, that's where we're going, or that, in fact, the only way you could secure those reproductive rights – so let me be clear: We know that reproductive rights have always been secured through economic access, but the kind of legal guarantee of at least the right to an abortion is what I'm talking about here. The work that we did, for example, to ensure that people had access to an abortion or had access to making decisions about their bodies, she's going to have to do that, and you just think about, how did this happen? But when you pay attention to that, then you're not surprised by data that we have that says, you know, young people have deep alienation in the political system – right? – don't believe, in fact, that it speaks to their concerns or their needs, and that young Black people are not deeply committed to the democracy as they understand it to be operating right now. You know, and I say to my colleagues all the time who are like, oh my God, the crisis of democracy that came from Trump – it's like no, there's been a crisis of democracy since 1619, and so if we don't deal with that, if we don't deal yet again with white supremacy and we only focus on, you know, the flouting of the norms by Trump, we're never going to empower young people to feel like they're full, equal citizens and that they have power in this democracy.

Mary Morten: Absolutely. And the last thing I want to talk to you about is HIV and AIDS, which is really how some of your work started. We know that we still need to fight AIDS and we still need prevention dollars. We know that it has flattened out in the white community but not Black and brown communities.

Cathy J. Cohen: That’s right.

Mary Morten: Primarily that's because of stigma and racism and how was it that we got a COVID vaccine in such a short amount of time, but, you know, we're almost 40 years later and we don't have something for HIV. What do you think the future looks like as we continue to address HIV and AIDS?

Cathy J. Cohen: I mean, this is a hard question for me and I'm going to give just a minute of background, which is to say the first – my dissertation and the first book I wrote was, as you said, The Boundaries of Blackness, which was all about the political response to AIDS in Black communities, or the lack of a political response to AIDS in Black communities, except for what we would consider now queer Black people who built organizations and communities and took care of each other. And so this question about HIV and AIDS, I don't want to discount some of the movement that we've seen because we both lived through an era where our friends were dying. 

Mary Morten: Exactly. My brother died from –

Cathy J. Cohen: Exactly. And so I don't want to say things are the same –

Mary Morten: No.

Cathy J. Cohen: But what I heard from you, and I think it's right, which is things should be much better because there's the potential for things to be much better. And we see, not unexpectedly, the flattening, as you said, the line in the white community. So, you know, I would say that part of this has to be a part of our language when we talk about Black Lives Matter. Right? It's like, which Black lives matter? What's the crisis that we're fighting? It is not just policing. It is the racial state that would ignore kind of the deaths for the suffering of Black and brown communities from HIV and AIDS, that how we think about HIV and AIDS has to be folded into how we think about the struggle for freedom and for liberation. And that means pressuring pharmaceutical groups to do better. It means pressuring the government to provide more resources. It means making sure that there are organizations that can do the education needed around HIV and AIDS. It means not allowing Black institutions to continue to spew – well, not racism, but stigma – right? – hate and homophobia. It means that there's still a lot of work to be done. And I think there's a way in which we've normalized HIV and AIDS in part because we see these lovely commercials on TV that are like, take this pill and you'll live with HIV and AIDS without, again, talking about the complexity of what does it mean to live with HIV and AIDS? And so, you know, I always try to remind young activists that there are other places, in fact, that people are suffering and that that has to be part of our narrative when we talk about what we're struggling against. And I think HIV and AIDS has to be a pillar in that fight in the movement.

Mary Morten: Well, there's lots of work to do. We've talked about a lot of it this evening. However, I am hopeful. Are you hopeful about the future? 

Cathy J. Cohen: I was just going to say there is work to do but I feel joy. I see young people and I see older people engaged in kind of the struggle for freedom, the way in which people went into the streets in 2020, our ability to, even under duress, continue to talk about what might be possible, the ways in which people talk about abolition and feminism. I think it is a moment to be hopeful but to be dug in and to create that hope by working. So, yeah, I feel hopeful.

Mary Morten: Well, thank you so much. I have so enjoyed this conversation. 

Cathy J. Cohen: Same here!

Mary Morten: We have been speaking with Dr. Cathy J. Cohen. And if you would like to reach out to Cathy to learn more about her projects, particularly GenForward, which will be something that in the next midterm elections will be very key and we need to uplift it and push it forward. We're going to have that information on our website. 

This has been another episode of “Gathering Ground.” I'm Mary Morton, until next time.